Trump's Magical Thinking on Credit

David Harsanyi rightly calls out Trump's demagoguery on credit card rates by likening them to the anti-capitalist rhetoric and price control policies of New York's new, socialist mayor:

Banks are businesses, after all, not charities.

Image from Ways and Means Democrats.

But if banks lose out charging riskier customers lower interest rates to get on the good side of the administration, they'll simply raise fees elsewhere, pull back on rewards and find other creative ways to make their reliable consumers pay.

Price-fixing never alleviates cost -- it merely displaces it.

Take Mamdani, the socialist mayor of New York, as he "cracks down," as one travel magazine referred to it, on "junk fees" in city hotels.

"Junk" is just a description of a cost that consumers and politicians have arbitrarily decided shouldn't be paid.

But they will be: Hotels will almost inevitably raise prices elsewhere or decrease services to make up for it.

Economic magical thinking never dies, however, because it's tethered to envy and anger rather than rationality.

Harsanyi even follows this with a quote from Thomas Sowell, whom I am tempted to call "The Forgotten Man of the Right," although that might be debatable, as some Democrats, at least, seem to remember him fondly.

My one criticism of this fine piece is that I wish it had explicitly stated the underlying economic principle, that price controls cause shortages. But then again, perhaps Harsanyi knows that his audience will be able to figure it out, while the rest won't, or won't care.

-- CAV

Why Populism Leads to Kakistocracy

It's about a 20 minute read, but I highly recommend Richard Hanania's thought-provoking essay titled "Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism" for its exploration of what populist means, and of what we can learn by looking at the track records of successful populist movements across the globe.

I am impressed with Hanania's successful navigation of both the vagueness of the term populist and the problem of finding concrete data to make his point about the adverse outcomes of populism.

A notable reason populism leads to poor government is that the blanket skepticism of institutions and "elites" that puts a populist into power comes from a kind of poor thinking that will insulate the populist leader from scrutiny:

The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.

...

Politicians that have a less educated base can make bad decisions and suffer fewer consequences for them. The fact that Trump is personally responsible through his tariffs policy for current economic woes is obvious to any informed observer, but might not be to an uninformed one. Trump's base has lower cognitive ability and less interest in politics anyway, so they are probably less likely to be shaken out of their partisan stupor by empirical reality. No one can deny that leftists are also often partisan in their thinking. But that partisanship is tempered by access to and a willingness to accept accurate sources of information. The New York Times is simply more likely to challenge the biases of its audience than Catturd, Elon Musk, or Fox News, and liberals are more likely to trust and accept real news than conservatives are.

A bit later in the essay, Hanania describes a fundamental error I see MAGA types make all the time:

We often focus on instances where elites reject ideas that turn out to be at least arguably correct. It is common to see discussions of universities or media outlets excluding or disparaging positions like opposition to DEI, skepticism over the claims of trans activists, or belief that covid leaked from a Chinese lab. In those instances, elite institutions can reasonably be criticized for having dismissed ideas they should have taken more seriously. That said, we must not lose sight of the fact that most of the time gatekeepers push people or ideas away, the establishment is right and the rebels are wrong.

Here's a partial list of ideas that are rejected by mainstream academics and journalists, but have been promoted or gotten respectable hearings on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country, over the last few years: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV does not cause AIDS; there were advanced ancient human civilizations during the Ice Age; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. If you are mad at academia because you think it is too woke on issues related to race and gender, note that it also excludes believers in telepathy, ghosts, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, flat Earth theory, reptilian overlords, chemtrails, Bigfoot, astrology as science, Holocaust denial, moon landing hoax theories, homeopathy, and spirit channeling of the dead. Of course, the most common reason institutions reject people is lack of intelligence and work ethic. [bold added]

Hanania's further observation that populists, especially on the right, appeal to identity politics are on point.

Hanania ends by arguing that populism should be seen as another political axis. I'm not sure I agree with him about that, but I do think his term Dale Gribble voter captures something important about the type of voter that supoorts Trump, and has supported similar politicians in the past.

-- CAV

Four Wins

A Friday Hodgepodge

Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.

***

1. Until recently, I was unaware that one could cook barley like pasta, rather than like rice. This is so much easier that it blows my mind that anyone cooks it like rice, at least on the stovetop.

This is good news for my wife, because this makes a favorite family recipe of hers easier enough for me to make that she'll get to enjoy it more often.

(No. I haven't posted that one here, but I might. I finally got this to turn out perfectly and want to rewrite it first.)

2. Helping with a stage of my in-laws' move allowed me to vet a local moving crew, which will come in handy when we move our daughter upstairs into her permanent bedroom. They did good work, and I got a reasonable idea of what the leader will need when we're ready in about a month.

That's one less thing to deal with in the meantime.

3. The light controller for the Christmas tree we bought last year had no off setting, so we replaced it.

Thanks to a brief power outage, I learned that the new controller doesn't really have an off setting, either. As soon as the power came back on, the tree lit up, despite being "off" before.

There are worse ways to learn that something is not fail-safe.

It's back to something I already have and know works. I'm done wasting money on light controllers.

4. Dave Barry might admire how I got myself out of wrapping Christmas gifts this year: I paid my son to do it after I saw what a fine job he did on a gift for his sister.

We both win! he said after he finished and I forked over thirty bucks. I couldn't have put it better, myself.

-- CAV

Windows 11 Makes Converts -- to Linux

Although, only a couple of years earlier, I openly described myself as a technophobe, I switched to using Linux as my primary operating system way back in 1996 and have used it as such ever since. I was recently-divorced and needed to make the best use of an already obsolescent 486 PC to get myself the rest of the way through grad school, and the switch saved me lots of money for other things.

It also, as I could tell any time I had to use a PC or a Mac, saved me lots of annoyance and inconvenience. Having to get my hands dirty came with the added knowledge that things don't have to be this way when dealing with the two most popular proprietary systems.

Fast forward to now, and one long-time Windows user reports numerous problems with Windows updates and describes his turning point in part as follows:

So there I was, finally grasping the reality of what you're up against, as a Windows user:

• Random bugs that break basic functionality
• Updates that install without permission and brick my system
• Copilot and OneDrive ads appearing in every corner of the OS
• Copilot buttons everywhere, coming for every application
• Can't even make a local account without hacking the setup with Rufus (they even removed the terminal workaround)
• Zero actionable fixes or even an acknowledgment of their fuckups [There is an impressive list of these elsewhere in his piece. --ed]

People often say Linux is "too much work.".

And I agree. They're completely justified to complain. There's the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads. And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to.

But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work.

And the difference with Windows is that you're going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything.

You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.

Being at the mercy of random major changes that require me to drop everything to repair my broken workflow is something I have observed for years that has kept me from entertaining the idea of leaving Linux, but now it appears to have become bad enough to cause Microsoft to lose customers.

If this guy reminds you of yourself (perhaps minus the anti-corporate tone), you might consider Linux. And here's a report from another person who just made the switch. ("I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great.")

-- CAV

The Babbling Sound of Cognitive Silence

Jonah Goldberg considers Donald Trump's relationship with the truth, and finds it ... absent:

In the immediate aftermath of Pretti's killing, members of the Trump administration took to TV and social media to describe Pretti as a "domestic terrorist" and an "assassin." Gregory Bovino, the CBP commander on the ground in Minneapolis, said "This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." (Bovino has since been removed from his post.) Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed the same talking points. Pretti's motive, she claimed, was "to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement" because he was a "domestic terrorist." White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller asserted that Pretti was an "assassin" who tried to "murder federal agents."

The administration is making all of this up. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are lying. They just don't care what the truth is.

In his seminal book On Bulls -- (the actual title isn't censored), philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt argues that lying implies a certain respect for, and knowledge of, the truth. "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bulls -- requires no such conviction." What this administration does is worse than lying because they don't care whether something is true or false, only whether it will be believed. [italics in original, links dropped]

Bovino Gone? Will It Matter?

There are reports (and denials) this morning to the effect that the head thug supervising ICE in Minnesota, Gregory Bovino, has been fired by Donald Trump.

In a normal world, this would be a step in the right direction, soon to be followed by the dismissal of Kristi Noem as head of Homeland Security, and a stated intent to abolish that entire department.

But this isn't a normal world, and both precedent and fundamentals weigh against anything Donald Trump doing any time soon making a jot of difference.

First, recent precedent suggests that Trump's firings are more performative than substantive. Just after the New Year, Trump had Venezuela's socialist dictator, Nicolas Maduro, extracted from that country and held in New York to face drug charges. Wails of protest from the left and seals clapping their flippers to the right notwithstanding, there has been no regime change.

Instead, it appears that when Trump says we're running Venezuela, he means: Socialists willing to cut a deal with him will stay in power while he pledges taxpayer money and the lives of American soldiers to prop them up while fixing the oil industry his new cronies ruined in the first place, so he can funnel money to a private account in Qatar.

Trump has made no stand for freedom, and appears to have betrayed anyone in Venezuela who didn't get the memo that we're ourselves an aspiring banana republic -- and thought we might overthrow this unfriendly regime.

Second, the very nature of ICE and Trump's war on "illegal" immigration argue that a public firing won't really matter. As Harry Binswanger recently argued:

ICE men are not police officers. Disobeying them is not anarchistic because their function and raison d'etre are to grab people and deport them.

Yes, given the laws against immigration, their actions could be called "law enforcement" in the abstract, but as we have seen, ICE acts arbitrarily, violently, thuggishly. They do not restrict their actions to criminalized immigrants. Or, more precisely, they, not the law, decide what the scope of their actions are.

The nature of an action follows from the nature of the entity that acts. The nature of ICE as an entity is: arbitrary force. They are thugs. I would never refer to them as "law enforcement."

(My use of "Gestapo" is figurative. Literally, ICE is the transition to that kind of evil agency.) [bold added]

Replacing the head of an agency designed to terrorize people will mean an uphill battle for a good person (if one would even accept such a job) and the kind of opportunity we don't want an incipient dictator to have, otherwise.

Trump sicced this agency on nonwhite immigrants in the first place and has defended it after its widely-publicized detention of an American citizen who is a veteran and now after it has murdered two American citizens in less than a month.

I can't imagine how anything Trump does now will be for any purpose other than to reduce bad publicity long enough for our easily-distracted news media to forget about it and find a more easily-dismissed (and discreditable) reason to be upset with him.

-- CAV

Bullets in the Back

According to the British press, two witnesses including a physician have contradicted the Trump Administration's claims that Alex Pretti, the second American citizen killed by ICE goons in a month, was brandishing a gun before he was killed:

The woman testified that she saw no sign of Pretti holding a gun at any point.

She said: "The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn't see him touch any of them -- he wasn't even turned toward them. It didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn't see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times ... I don't know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him ... "

She continued: "I have read the statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground.

...

The victim had "at least three bullet wounds in his back", the doctor said, in addition to one on his upper left chest and another possible gunshot wound in his neck.

"I checked for a pulse, but I did not feel one," the doctor said.

This last bit of information came only after the doctor insisted on helping Pretti, despite the goons refusing at first, while they were counting bullet holes rather than rendering aid.

I will be amazed if this Administration deviates from its pattern of doubling down on demonizing its victims and digging in its heels to protect what is at best blatant incompetence, almost as much as I would be to see Congress get off its behind and at least attempt to hold Kristi Noem responsible.

Elsewhere, a Republican strategist openly wondered whether Trump is "trying to lose the midterms."

On this evidence, if our country still has a pulse and Trump lets this continue, time will show that he already has.

-- CAV